


If You Were Here

by 57circlesofhell



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Desperately unspoken, M/M, Pining, Post-Reichenbach, eulogy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-18
Updated: 2015-04-18
Packaged: 2018-03-23 14:19:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3771415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/57circlesofhell/pseuds/57circlesofhell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the week after Sherlock’s fall, John wore a smile when faced with other people. Never mind that it was impossible for him to hide the way the muscles of his jaw and neck stayed taut beneath the surface. He knew other people could see that he wasn’t OK—the tilted heads and too gentle voices of Mrs. Hudson, Greg, and Molly told him as much—but the reflex to shield others from his grief held him together like a transparent suit of armor. Every vulnerable part of him was inaccessible but visible, guarded but exposed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Were Here

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Tumblr user cloakstone69 for beta reading this fic!

In the week after Sherlock’s fall, John wore a smile when faced with other people. Never mind that it was impossible for him to hide the way the muscles of his jaw and neck stayed taut beneath the surface. He knew other people could see that he wasn’t OK—the tilted heads and too gentle voices of Mrs. Hudson, Greg, and Molly told him as much—but the reflex to shield others from his grief held him together like a transparent suit of armor. Every vulnerable part of him was inaccessible but visible, guarded but exposed.

He wouldn’t leave Baker Street or take any visitors the day before the funeral, leaving Mrs. Hudson to accept the condolences, cards, and flowers that were meant for him. She occasionally went up to bring him food or fuss over the fact that he’d left it all untouched. “You need to eat, dear,” she tutted. “And you were always the one reminding him.”  He smiled and nodded at her automatically, meaning to answer, “I’ll eat in time,” but he felt as if he’d turn inside out if he opened his mouth to speak. It was just as well. He was meant to be writing the eulogy, not chatting.

At least he intended to write. Mostly, he spent what must have been hours waking from involuntary stupors with his eyes fixed on odd objects around the flat. He woke from one trance to the alarming red of the living room rug, which he sat on cross legged and barefoot in front of the fireplace, the paper ghosts of aborted eulogies balled up and strewn around him. He found himself staring at the violin with no memory of having opened the case. His eyes would settle on and tear away from the smiley face on the wall, the skull on the mantelpiece, Sherlock’schair looming to the right, Sherlock’sknife impaling the Cluedo board, Sherlock’s books weighing down the shelf. Things. Just things. To think that Sherlock Holmes, the most feverishly _alive_ human being he’d ever met, would be outlasted by natter and tat. _Dull_ , he’d say.

Dull. That was it. Beyond the grief he was avoiding, well past the anger and the hurt, there was an uncomplicated numbness paralyzing John that he could only describe as _dull._ He allowed himself to focus on that for the sake of simplicity. No other part of him would let him write without saying too much. It was well into the afternoon before he could focus enough to put coherent words to paper, and even then he struggled. He managed to get up and pour himself a glass of scotch first, walking past the cold lunch and breakfast that shared the kitchen table with Sherlock’s dusty science equipment. He went back to sitting on the rug between their chairs, notepad and pen in hand.

_Sherlock Holmes was_

He kept starting there, pretending he’d ever thought of Sherlock as definable. He drank, scribbled, tossed, drank, scribbled, tossed.

_Sherlock Holmes was a mystery to me._

_Sherlock Holmes was the best and wisest_

_The world needed him. I needed him._

Toss.

_Sherlock Holmes was an arse. I’m allowed to say it because I lived with him. But he was also the best man I’ve ever known. I never got the chance to tell him this, but I would’ve spent my life with him if he let me. I would’ve taken anything from him—all the arrogance, all the chilling silence, all the boring monologues, all the brushes with death, I would’ve taken them all for the rest of my life because he gave me a life. He never even knew it. I never even told him. I was always going to be there if he wanted me. All he had to do was say the word. But he never did. And I never told him. And then he jumped._

John read this over, ground his teeth at it. Then he crumpled it and threw it against the grate of the fireplace, lay belly up on the floor, and looked to the ceiling.

“You bastard,” he choked out. “If you don’t stop this now…if you make me do this, I swear I’ll kill you myself.” He nearly leapt out of his skin when his words were answered by the sound of feet moving around the flat, but he let himself go numb again when he looked to the kitchen and saw that it was only Mrs. Hudson. She wordlessly gathered his plates of food, gave him a knowing look, and made her way back downstairs.

* * *

John didn’t know if it was a blessing or a curse that the casket was closed. On the one hand, he didn’t think he could bear seeing a lifeless Sherlock a second time. On the other hand, he couldn’t help but imagine Sherlock climbing out of the casket, calling the lot of the mourners idiots for ever thinking he was dead, and barreling through the graveyard with his coat collar turned up against the wind.

John was unambiguously grateful that the small graveside committal was free of the sort of open wailing he was incapable of engaging with. Aside from Mrs. Hudson, who was sat next to him dabbing at her eyes and squeezing his limp hand, no one shed a tear. Mycroft, the only member of Sherlock’s family present, showed little emotion beyond perfunctory solemnity. Even Molly Hooper was uncharacteristically calm, though John had always suspected she was more held together than she let on.

There was music—a recording of one of Sherlock’s own compositions—and then John was the first to speak. There was no invocation. He stood, gently pushing Mrs. Hudson’s hand away when she tried to help him to his feet. He focused again on the part of himself that felt numbed, dull to keep himself from forgetting all the words he’d prepared. He stood next to the casket, steeled himself, and let the words he’d memorized fall out of his mouth in an orderly fashion, all the original emotion behind them apparent only in the tightness of his voice.

“Sherlock Holmes was human,” he started, his eyes downcast, his left hand balled into a fist. “That was the most important thing about him. If he were here, he’d roll his eyes and mutter, ‘obviously,’ but it wasn’t always obvious to me that someone as extraordinary as he is—was—could care, fail, get hurt, and die like the rest of us. I’ve spent the past year and a half trying to describe him, and I realize now how rubbish I’ve been at it.

“I wanted people to know what sort of man he was, but I don’t think I even quite made sense of him in all the time I lived with him. He’d go from pacing the flat like a bored child to composing on his violin like a hopeless romantic to firing off deductions like a calculating machine in a single day, and I could never quite tell which he thought he was or which he was supposed to be.

“But if there’s one thing I came to understand completely about Sherlock Holmes, it’s that he was a great man. He once told me not to make people into heroes, but he was one. I’m proof of that. Every other life he’s ever saved, every case he’s ever solved, every murderer he’s ever stopped is proof of that, and we’re right to believe in him.”   

He didn’t look up at his audience until he finished speaking. Molly, Greg, Mrs. Hudson, Mike Stamford, and Mycroft were all giving him the same look, as if they’d just watched him tear his shirt open in grief and drop to his knees in front of them. He nodded once, as if that meant something, and walked back to his seat.

After the burial, Molly chased after John when he tried to walk back to the cars ahead of everyone else. “John,” she called after him. “There’s something I want to let you know.” John stopped in his tracks and turned to face her. He didn’t bother trying to smile.

Molly struggled to find the words to say, but when she did, her voice was clearer and calmer than John had ever remembered it being. “Before he had to go…um…I mean before _it_ happened, what he cared about most was you. You counted more than anyone to him,” she said. John didn’t respond, so she went on. “I talked to him the day before and I could just tell that the worst thing in the world to him was the thought that you might doubt him. I just thought you should know.”

John’s eye twitched. He resisted the urge to ask her why he said all of those things on the rooftop, then, and why he jumped, but he knew it wouldn’t be fair. Instead he nodded, thanked her, and retreated to the back of a rented car.

* * *

He packed without thinking—his gun, as many clothes as he could fit in one case, the bare minimum of toiletries, his laptop, his moleskin journals—and left Baker Street two days after the funeral. He said nothing to Mrs. Hudson on his way out. He didn’t know what to say. He could always call her later. He could always come home later. But for the time being at least, John needed elsewhere, anywhere, a place far away that wasn’t a living record of his life with Sherlock.

He took the tube—he couldn’t bear to be in the back of a cab alone—and found what he was looking for in a barely accommodating hotel near Paddington Station. He sat on the bed in the center of his room for the night, pulled his shoes off, and lay down, not bothering to take off his coat.

He pulled his phone out of his coat pocket and played the voice messages on it on speaker phone, deleting the dozens of recordings left by people asking after him, wondering where he was, if he was all right. He stopped deleting when he finally came across what he was looking for—a three minute long message Sherlock had left him on June 29, 2011.

It was an utterly ridiculous message. John had spent that day with Harry, it being the anniversary of her divorce, only to discover on the cab ride home that Sherlock had tried to call him seven times. He listened to the voice message expecting to hear the details of some urgent case or a drug fueled tirade, but what he got instead was Sherlock describing a string of particularly dull clients who had stopped by 221B while he’d been at Harry’s. It was a rambling, caustic, insulting, and unintentionally hilarious rant that probably continued long after the message was forced to stop recording at three minutes. It ended abruptly with Sherlock saying, “This is the last time I’m letting clients into the flat when you’re away. If you were here…”

John couldn’t bring himself to delete the message. Every time Sherlock behaved in a way that seemed callous, machine-like, or inhuman, John would go up to his room, play that message, and laugh as he listened to all three minutes of Sherlock sounding like a bored, petulant child desperate for attention. He needed the reminder that the cold, self-proclaimed sociopath he lived with had once missed him so much after only a half a day that he’d called seven times and finally settled for voicemail just to rant.

John played it again in the hotel room with his phone clutched to his chest and a hand clasped over his eyes. As soon as Sherlock started in on the first client, John chuckled. It was a fond, quiet laugh at first, but it crescendoed into wheezing hysterics. At some point, the original laughter devolved into violent, involuntary spasms that became painful enough to draw tears, the first tears John truly allowed himself after the fall.

He didn’t sleep that night. He kept playing the message. Even when he wasn’t playing it, he heard Sherlock’s voice. Even when he didn’t hear Sherlock’s voice, he tried to imagine it. He fought and succumbed to the urge to cry in earnest. He’d managed to escape all the things and people that reminded him of his loss, but Sherlock was still gone and Sherlock was still with him and he was alone in a cramped room with a gun in the drawer as if it were the day they met.

By the time the first light of the sun fell through the window, John knew he couldn’t go back to Baker Street, not right away. A part of him, most of him, fully believed that he’d open the door and see Sherlock swishing about the flat in one of his robes, occupied with some mental exercise or another. The part of him that knew better refused to return and be disappointed.

Having nowhere else to go, John willed himself to walk forward into the void that was to be his life now, now that Sherlock no longer defined it. He washed up, changed into jeans and a checkered shirt, and walked out into the hallway with a slight hitch in his gait, unaware of where he was going or why. All he knew was that he couldn’t let himself lie still and squander the remnants of the life that Sherlock gave him.

He ended up taking a cab to St. Bart’s Hospital. He stood where Sherlock had told him to stand, looked to the rooftop, brought his phone to his ear, and allowed himself the indulgence of listening to Sherlock’s ridiculous message one last time. He listened to the full thing, nodded solemnly when it ended with, “if you were here,” and finally gave himself permission to delete it. He didn’t need it anymore. He spared one more glance at St. Bart’s, suddenly very aware that all the years he spent there were overshadowed by that single terrible day, and then turned back the way he came.  


End file.
